HIERODOULEIA. Contemporary scholarship uses the questionable expression "sacred prostitution" to refer to a sexual rite practiced in the ancient Near East. In the temples of Ishtar, Astarte, Mâ, Anahita, and Aphrodite, for example, women, often virgins, offered themselves sexually to strangers. Sometimes the temples were staffed by such "sacred prostitutes." Their actions were ritual components of the cult of the goddess in question. In ancient Greece, the word for such women was hierodoulē, or "sacred servant." The term used here, hierodouleia ("sacred service"), refers to the ritual.

This survey will exclude practices associated with such terms as bacchanalia, saturnalia, and orgy, which refer to the temporary loosening of sexual restraints that occurs frequently in many societies all over the world during certain festivals, rites of passage, and other types of religious observances. In the current state of scholarship on the topic of cultic sexual activity, it would be...